Joan Anderson, the model who named the Hula Hoop and missed out on a fortune

It was 2018. At the Tribeca film festival, Anderson was at last given credit for her vision which sparked the Hula Hoop craze of the late 1950s. Thanks to her, millions of American children and adults started swivelling bamboo rings around their waists in a whirl of healthy activity. By November 1958, the waist-swinging wonder was so popular it spawned a hit song: The Hula Hoop Song made it to No 38 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year.

In the short documentary film, Hula Girl, Anderson emerged as a smart, kindly woman whose lifelong commitment to physical fitness enabled her to grasp the potential of the hoop when she first saw its popularity in Australia. She brought one to the US, coined its famous name and with her husband, Wayne, set out to make the most of its obvious appeal.

The dark back story: they were denied a fortune by the founders of the Wham-O toy company, which purloined both the idea of the hoop and the name the couple did not patent. In four months in 1958, Wham-O sold 25 million Hula Hoops at $1.98 each. Though a court settlement later ruled the Andersons had provided significant “design, manufacturing, product and sales ideas” the couple received a fraction of the royalties, just $6,000.

“We often talked about the money we could have made from it and maybe changed life a little bit, but it didn’t work out that way, so why be angry with something you can’t change?” Anderson says in Hula Girl, without rancour. “Happiness is definitely the best revenge.” Her film festival audience cheered.

Anderson, 101, died in a California nursing home last month. Born Joan Manning in Sydney, Australia, she was a swimwear model known as “the Pocket Venus” when she met Wayne Anderson, a US fighter pilot, on Bondi Beach in 1945. They soon married, moving to Pasadena, California, the next year.

While her husband sang with a big band, Anderson signed to LA’s Blue Book Modeling Agency, whose roster included the teenage Norma Jeane Dougherty – the future Marilyn Monroe. The two appeared in beauty pageants together.

After the birth of her four children, Anderson became a full-time mother. Her husband started a business making woodworking machines, over the years selling equipment and offering production advice to Arthur “Spud” Melin, Wham-O’s co-founder.

On a Christmas trip to see her Australian family, Anderson came across the hoops, sold by a Sydney department store. “Everywhere I’d go, everybody was giggling and carrying on, and I asked what was going on,” she said in Hula Girl. “They said: ‘Oh, everyone’s doing the hoop. They just love it.”

She asked her mother to post a hoop to California, where it captivated children and adults alike. When she gave a demonstration to friends, one said: “You look like you’re doing a hula” – the Hawaiian dance. She recalled: “I said: ‘There’s the name, Hula Hoop.’ It was born that night at our dinner party.”

Determined to market the hoop, the Andersons took it to Melin, whose company was famous for the mass production of the Frisbee.

“We never went into his office,” said Anderson. “There were no witnesses, just my husband and myself. [Melin] thought it was quite interesting. He thought it was a great name. He said: ‘Looks like it has some merit and if it makes money for us, it’s gonna make money for you.’”

In weeks, Melin stopped taking the couple’s calls. As sales soared, Wayne Anderson asked Wham-O repeatedly for royalties and in 1961 filed a lawsuit. Wham-O argued the cost of scaling up manufacturing combined with losses when sales fell meant the company only broke even. The Andersons accepted their meagre recompense.

Laralyn Willis, Anderson’s daughter, was telling friends about her mother’s life at a luncheon one day – and was overheard by an intrigued diner, whose own daughter, Amy Hill, was a filmmaker. Willis and Hill soon met and the filmmaker and her husband, Chris Riess, took on the task of establishing the story’s veracity.

The truth emerged before a cheering New York audience. “Mum was thrilled, she got to go on the red carpet,” Willis said. “People kept running up to ask: ‘Can I have your autograph?’ or ‘Can I take a picture with you?’ She looked at me and said: ‘Oh God, I don’t really want to be famous!’”

And yet she found a kind of immortality: as Teresa Brewer sang, “From LA to New York, from Georgia to Duluth/ Everyone is playing with the Hula Hoop.”

Joan Anderson, born in Sydney on 28 December 1923, died on 14 July 2025, aged 101

Photograph by Chris Riess and Amy Hill